Sorry but No.. What is your idea of inactive? I have numerous alts and many don't spend time in game except when there is a holiday event going and i want to grab a big pile of furniture fast so i can spend more time working on the styles and other item items available. Now depending on what all is for sale, how much I need to buy to get a feat and if I even like most of what is available there are events where those alts don't even need to be used. So some times as much as 6 months or more may go by before I use them. Now frankly used or not I subscribe and have active alts PLAYING pretty much daily. So used or not those alts belong to my account and my account is definitely active. Then lets add in the fact that we have many players that do the exact same thing with ever new DLC. They arrive in game and spend countless amounts of real money using replays to run that new content over and over until they have every single feat and every piece of new gear available (and in some cases they can and do get that done is days or maybe a week or two tops). At that point because they play several other MMOs they disappear and no one sees them again until the next DLC arrives. We have had gaps between DLC that were as long as 6 months. They are still playing the game and still handing Daybreak cash to play so despite not being around often they still support the game. We also have players that just get tired of the grind and take breaks. They stop subscribing .. because frankly if your not going to ever log in for 6 months to a year are you REALLY that crazy to keep handing them money every month. BUT they have every intention of coming back eventually. No one can decide what is clearly inactive. Now I had a buddy in game that grew tired of it and simply stopped logging on. Its been close to two years now since he has even logged on just to say hi. I'd say that would definitely qualify as inactive. Heck we were in the same league that I run and recently I kept his alts all on the roster for over a year in case he had a change of heart but YEAH I got rid of them all a while back.. But see I knew the guy and knew what was happening so it was easy for me to determine he was gone and not coming back.. See the Devs at DCUO do not have that kind of detailed information so unless a player decides to quit the game and deletes all their characters they have no clue when that player may decide to come back. And if they try and find out every single character they own has to pick a new name.. that could be enough to send them away again.. And that could mean less revenue for Daybreak. Hey you wanted a reply I can pretty much promise you will never get one from the Devs or Daybreak but all that stuff I just listed is why they don't just constantly recycle names every few months.
And THIS is the other reason a name reclaim can be totally useless. Okay so let's say they actually did another reclaim. And immediately players start scrambling for whatever has now become available. So let's say 10 folks want the name Super Hawkgirl. Well without adding a pile of xxx's or Ooo's or numbers in front or in back of it exactly ONE of those ten will get to be Super Hawkgirl while the other 9 will be disappointed and ticked off. In other word 90% (or more) of the players will walk away just as upset or even more upset than they were before the reclaim. Its an endless cycle of frustration over a game you just gave a big pile of Pixels you are moving around. LOL go shoot stuff and stop agonizing over the small things
Here's your problem - you know the toon is inactive, but you do not know about the account. With the name reclaims that have been done, SOE/Daybreak never touched active accounts unless two identical names on the later-to-be-same server were the same. Only then the "first come, first served" rule applied. The account owner could sit on the name on of up to 33 or 34 slots (don't know exactly about the char slot bug since I wasn't affected, regular max char slots are at 32 when subscribed) and keep it for "later" and thus not offering it for sale. Chances are of course higher it's just someone who took a look and didn't like the game, but in that case you would have missed the name freeing up before, since names on inactive accounts have been purged twice. A lot of people need to get into their heads that toon inactive does not equal account inactive. And Daybreak will not touch an inactive character on an active account simply because for the majority of these character slots, Daybreak charges money. Which is, I guess, another "Welcome to Capitalism" Now for: Alright, I got your reference And I'm here, name-squatter and dealer. Somewhat certified even I think I already explained why I did this back then at the first name reclaim - basically to get exactly your reaction and opinion about name reclaims established in the playerbase. Why? Because PC and PS combined I'm sure I have a double digit number of accounts with maybe 3 I did not put any money into, one of these 3 by choice for bug testing (for quite some time my favourite way to spend time in DCUO). And that leaves still a double digit amount of accounts with money put into it. I'd be really p...angry to log in one day and find one of my more elaborate toons ripped of its name because I didn't play it for 5 month, or not in a certain time frame, and especially on paid character slots. To get some teenage b.....boy or girl what they want but didn't get because someone else had it already - and I had (and stilll have) it with these special snowflakes. So, I used every slot available - and even bought some - to get a good chunk of names to add to the names for sale thread, same with the second name reclaim, to ensure that I never ever again will to have to spend time til some deadline on order to ensure to keep what I acquired first and within legal terms of service. Together with the other sellers, the impact was great, as your own opinion shows. Now, the key point - did I make ingame resources from it? Nope. The last succesful sale was some time ago due to me taking a long break: https://forums.daybreakgames.com/dc...flash-biography-want-your-iconic-name.286179/ The item in question was planned to be donated to someone who runs funny(=entertaining) giveaways here on the forums, but refused due to being at that time, like me, not sure about the ingame future. I then send it to someone wellknown in the Funhouse who was very connected and active at that time and could determine who of the Funhaouse crowd of then could use it - pretty sure this last forum user will probably not have recognized that this ingame mail was from me. Also pretty sure that you could guess the two names within 3 guesses each Now, that does not turn me from sinner to saint, since I explicitly stated - I organized all this for my personal reasons. With the cat out of the sack, will I free up the names I squat or give them away for free? No, because everyone paying for a name learns that these character names do represent a form of ingame value. So whoever bought such a name (not only from me) will stop supporting name reclaim petitions on the forums - unless being a hypocrite You can PM me anytime about this, just don't expect a handout - the only handouts I support are for customer appreciation or to makeup for inaccessible service etc. As for the topic/OP: Run another name reclaim and I will end up with another pile of names, on paid slots. That simple, and if I happen to know what names you're after with your little plunder and pillage action, I'll be getting - not trying to, getting - these names first. It maybe ok to take from other people where you live, but until SOE/Daybreak included inactive names in the name reclaim that was necessary due to technical reason, no company did this because the teams knew it was something that could hinder players from coming back, and maybe even leave money again in the game. I really think these folks who as kids threw their fit in grocery stores etc. because there was no more chocolate ice cream or whatever really need a stone wall in their lives they can run into over and over until they learn, give up without learning or their skull breaks open - I intend to be that stone wall when it comes to these "I want that!" name reclaims, active or just hanging around in DCUO or fully back at STO.
You have a massive misunderstanding of capitalism, morals, ethics and fairness. Just because you can do something does not mean you should. Capitalism is not buying & selling anything not nailed down or that we can get our hands on for free. All forms of trade have rules and boundaries that should not be crossed. All things considered. If I buy up all the collections, auras and whatever within the game and charged 100mill each and keep buying everything up making everyone pay up or do without. That would be ok.............. Yes....No?????
Ah, c'mon, I know you know better. What is described there is basically the capitalism of our time. That's why organisations like "Transperancy International" gain more and more attention, and organisations like the FIFA find.... creative ways to get rid of "corruption" on their end Basically what many resellers in the game do, for quite some time. Yes, by ethics it's a questionable approach, and yes, since this is DCUO and not "Used-car salesmen online" the content of buying and reselling maybe shouldn't even be there, but unless the devs come up with a way that limits re-selling (or allows the seller to disallow re-selling), it's nothing that can be done about it, and a number of people are OK with it (I know from the reactions when I last suggested to get rid of the re-selling). And ethics is double edged sword here - is it "ok" to free names up again just because someone has an insane "I want that!"-fit and can't accept that someone else was faster and it is no longer available? I doubt that, especially since most character slots toons are kept on are paid for, as in "service".
I've cornered particular markets in game like that several times, so...absolutely. Either people would actually buy them, which means that people think that's the value they're worth, or you won't sell them, keep throwing cash on broker fees until you're bankrupt, and then the market will equalize. As long as people are operating freely in whatever parameters are set, and those parameters aren't heavily weighted to another person, all is fair in love, war, and money. If the park in the original example had rules against that sort of behavior, then they were violated. The reason would be it's their park, their property, their rules. Just like a game, for instance. As long as you are not item duping, money glitching or other violating the rules of the game, play on, playa. The person in line in front of you had a spot. That spot has value, because you and others want it. That person extracted the value of the spot for cash instead of enjoying it for himself. If you grow a potato, should you be forced to eat it, or can you sell it? For the record, I'm not a pure libertarian/free market capitalist. There are certain areas where capitalism fails. But fairness in an amusement park queue? Hell, there are companies now that will sit in line for tickets for you, hold a spot for Black Friday, all sorts of things. And that's wonderful.
I think that's perfectly ok, because I'm someone who put that collection/aura in the broker just got paid, and I can go out and farm that collection and put it up for 99Million and undercut you....thanks for the bump in price! it's a free market society and the buyers will still dictate the price. Same for names....if no one wanted to buy names, no one would sell them, and even less would 'horde' them. Reclaim just puts more product out in the market. Reinheld
There are two types of inactive accounts basically and I really don't know if it would help people get the name they want. An inactive account and inactive toons can be different things. People do have alts some use them for bank space others use them for leveling or for whatever they use them for. The account being inactive is what they used last time because they gave ample amount of time to log in to save the name. Oh by the way I believe they put a _1 when there was a duplicate during the server merge. While I don't pitty those who want iconic names, it would not benefit hardly anyone because there is a super low prospect that they would get what they wanted anyway and others would be sold. Personally, I wouldn't want to be Batman, I would want my own name. I also wouldn't want to stop others from being or making a variation though.
Hmm...yeah.. I don't think that another name reclaim; it just didn't work as well as it was supposed to. The only way I can see players getting a chance at obtaining names they missed out on for their characters is if DCUO went back to offering multiple servers to log into again. And we know that will not happen any time soon.
My dream name would be the user name that I have here on the forums. It would be great to have for my Phoenix toon in the game. But since the name looks too much like the F bomb I guess, it comes up as invalid.
Ways to find a "special" name to call your own. Its already been mentioned briefly but let's expand a bit... Go to Google and pull up their translator. Now take that name you long to have but some one in game already has it and type it in .. then just start picking different languages until you find one that gives you a name you like. I did this a number of years ago when i decided i want my Ice tank to be called Black Widow. Well that was not available but when I pulled up the Italian translation of "Black Widow" out popped "Vedova Nera" I switched the names around and Nera Vedove was born. While no one else had a clue I knew I was the Italian black widow. Not even sure but I'd bet there are hundreds of languages on that translator so with just a little but of effort you could be whoever you wanted to be. I've done the same sort of thing with ALT that had a particular power set. When i created my Water powered DPS/Healer i had no particular name in mind but wanted something related to the WATER... I did a web search for Gods/Goddesses that were associated with Water(rivers, lakes oceans etc). Under the list of Water Gods I found Nereides.. an entire group of female sea nymphs that spent time helping sailors. Over time they were even associated with MERMAIDS... And tada Lady Nereides of the royal court of Atlantis was born. My water based character on the test server is known as Lord Noden. used the same method to name him. A Noden is a Celtic god associated with HEALING and the SEA. Take a little bit of time and use a little bit of imagination and you can have a really cool name that no one else ever even dreamed of using.
I know you think it's ok but there are many others here that say it's fine & dandy to sell names and are against any sort of a name reclaim but on the other hand they complain about ungodly prices in the broker because they cannot finish the collections they are wanting. IMO, DCUO needs to add two more spaces for names and then add at least another line for more characters. Then DCUO needs to add the selling of names into the the community standards / Gold Selling part of the TOS and make it perfectly clear that it's unacceptable. Selling names is as bad as some guy holding up a line and taking cash for letting others cut in front of everyone else. Try that a football game and see how far you get before you're physically removed from the line by others that were waiting their turn.
Some of the ‘OG’ names people have the cheek to try and sell really make me laugh. There was someone trying to sell “Shores” on EU hero trade chat the other day. WTF.
They could curb a lot of the name-selling by just running a regular name purge. The reason why the selling (and squatting) is such a big deal is because names only get freed up about every 3-5 years when there is a massive server merger. Other MMOs run regular name purges, and do them quite successfully, without all the hoopla and drama. It's not really that complicated. Run it as an algorithm, once per quarter. 1) If an account hold an active subscription, then all names on the account stay. 2) If an account is not subscribed, has the character been logged in to within the past 90 days? If the answer is yes, then the name stays. 3) If the account is not subscribed, and the character has not had a 1 second login within the past 90 days, then the character gets renamed to their Original Name with the suffix being added of Underscore and then a roman numeral. The character is also awarded a free namechange token. If nobody else wanted the name, it's easy enough when you log in to just change it back. I've got characters with the _DNG, _ZH, and _PC1 suffixes from previous name changes. Never once has it made me throw a temper tantrum and consider my character "ruined". In fact, those free namechange tokens were quite entertainingly put to use. Clearing out the names from squatters who aren't actually using them frees up the names for real players, but it also strongly combats the name-sellers. Those players don't actually log in to those characters and use them for anything, and when the names consistently don't sell for the hundreds of millions of dollars they want, eventually they will end up accidentally getting reset and shuffled back in to the pile. It's honestly just a matter of good customer service. As a business, it is smarter to treat the paying customers you have well, instead of shutting down your paying customers in order to try and appease former customers who no longer do business with you. "Maybe they'll come back" does not hold the same profit margin as "definitely they are paying money right now."
Again someone not getting it. You can not determine activity at character level, espcially if selling character slots are being sold. Exactly this - selling something that you later do not guarantee to keep working - is NOT good customer service. If no character of the account has logged in for x amount of time, we can talk inactivity. I'd personally LOVE to see all the whining at the forums when someone didn't realize one of his fuller bank toons wasn't logged in for 90 days and then sending some freshly acquired items to the name they always used to do Then we talk "good customer service" again LMAO. And for the ones with the PC-only-blinkers on: On PS, the virtual keyboard saves words used for long time, so the toon name may be added in with just 3 clicks in this scenario - not involving a friendlist entry for said character (which would be something Daybreak could take care off). It's hilarious how many self-centered beings around here come up with the "it's ok for me, so it is for everyone"-ahem.... I assume they consider that "logic"....
Well, given that mail expires after 30 days, I would hope that most people would log into that "fuller bank toon" within the 90 days. And if you have simply friended the alt that you are sending this mail to, then by typing only the first few characters of their name, the friends list will populate it with "OriginalName_X" instead of "OriginalName" because when the namechange goes into effect, it changes it for every single friends list as well. You might not realize that because you haven't been through it before. This extreme outlier that you're struggling to grasp for involves a player having to almost intentionally try to do it. While you try to insist that it is impossible for the game to determine login status, I would counter with what was experienced during the Megaservers mergers. 20 servers getting merged, with some names existing on essentially every server, and the way that Mepps broke it down on the forums was incredibly similar to what I just proposed. Mepps had said that Legendary Memberships would trump all Preferred and Free Play accounts, regardless of activity, so subscribing was the best way to hold on to names. Beyond that, it was based on total hours played on the individual character. Each character has their own gameplay and login records, individual of the overall account. So if there is any change to their total gameplay since the previous purge, then they have in fact been logged into within the past 90 days. It's just some basic coding. Doesn't matter to me in the slightest. I don't mind having the _Tag at the end of my name on the names I lost; it's never stopped me from playing the characters. I just happen to believe that, as a business, it's all about the bottom dollar, taking care of your customers so they keep paying money. And "customers" means people who pay money, not people who quit years ago and no longer contribute anything. Denying current players so they can protect the squatters names makes about as much sense as a restaurant turning away customers at the door while they still have empty tables, because maybe someday some old customer might come back and want that booth again.
Not anymore. Don't know when they changed this, as I pointed out I returned after a long break, but I have mail older than that in my inbox currently. EDIT: Just checked and the oldest mail in my inbox is currently 45 days old. And the age stamp is not yellow/red (color change used to indicate closing in to when the mail will get deleted). So it's probably 60 or 90 days now. A dev will probably know. And as I said, on PS there is no need to friend your alt since the PS virtual keyboard saves it for quite some time (and the PS4 even longer than the PS3 did). So PS players can have a "clean" friendlist without their alts on it. The one insisting here is you, trying to push your point again. It doesn't matter what does or does not matter to YOU, it does matter what matters to the majority of players. And since name trading/selling is a thing and most name reclaim requests come from people who want a specific name, names obviously do matter to an amount of players. I also did not insist that it is impossible for the game to get these information. I insist that it is wrong to determine activity on the toon level instead of the account level. And during name reclaims, both has been done in the past. Leaves the question: Why enter a discussion if the subject of it doesn't matter to oneself? Can someone listening only to Rap/Hip-Hop add something substantial to a thread comparing Stones to Beatles? To get back to your suggestion: If you put your "bottom dollar" perspective on the people who sell names, you will just find that your suggestion won't help. Let's take a non-bugged subscribed account for example: The game does not deliver much to make having alts rewarding - furniture feats during events and that's basically all the "advantage" one can get. A power game may have 4 useful characters - one for each support role, and one dedicated DPS, each usually spec'd to the FOTM power for each role. Leaves 28 slots for name hoarding at a time, and none of them would be touched by your suggestion. Once a name is sold of, these slots can of course be re-used, so getting the slots is sorta a "once for always investment". With the bottom dollar in mind, these folks will protect their business, and put everything needed to keep it up on the price of the names. So, instead you snag toon names from even active premium accounts. These are accounts where people can easily sink money in as well, despite some players see the "subscription" as the "holy" way to go. Have one of these guys lose a name they were saving up for later, or maybe all names due to a longer stay in hospital and you generate angry customers, without any need to do so. In the last example even the change from "active character" to "active account" wouldn't help. Plus the "subscription bug" scenario - this was way more present on the forums before Daybreak had the "Support"-part disappear - on a usually subscribed account that has, say 3, non-active toons on it, which names get lost during a subscription bug. You have the potential to generate a lot of anger within existing, maybe long time or at least returning customers, to get - what in return? A couple of pesky self-centered teens on the "I want"-trip which will leave the game in majority anyway again due its shortcomings in graphics, structure, easy access, pricing etc compared to other, more actual games of today? Neglecting/spitting on existing customers for the sake of "potential" new customers is a bad business move, and Daybreak knows this first hand since they tried this sillyness a couple of times starting in their SOE days already and always ended up with a bloody nose business-wise. The reclaims by now were technically necessary in basic, and they used the opportunity to extend the range in both occasions. And some players still didn't get the name they waited for, and keep insisting in re-doing it - instead of realising that the name in questions is probably on an active, most likely even subscribed account.
The whole "OG name"-trend is the most stupid thing ever lol. How did it go so far that people now think that ANY one-word name is a good one? "Want to sell super-rare, OG name "Table", 500 mil or BEST OFFER bruh" ...
